  It is common knowledge that an e-mail id, which is in wide circulation, becomes more vulnerable to spam or junk mails.
As regular readers of this column would recall, one solution to control this menace is to make your main e-mail address less known to the public. Actions such as publishing the address on web sites, providing it to on-line services while signing-up an account with them and the like are some of the means through which an e-mail address gets out of your hand.
One trick that will make an e-mail id less public is to use a throwaway or disposable e-mail address. This column has already featured a few such services. The service, Mailinator ( http://www.mailinator.com ) that helps us create instant e-mail ids and the e-mail alias service, Mailnull ( http://mailnull.com/ ), are typical examples. Here, we explore some free mail forwarding services that automatically expire after a specified period. Spamgourmet ( http://spamgourmet.com/ ) is almost similar to `Mailnull' but with some extra features. It allows you to create several e-mail ids that can be made to disappear into the cyberspace automatically, after use for a specified number of times. To use the service, you have to provide a log-in name and an e-mail id for forwarding your mails.
Once the registration process is over, whenever you want to provide an e-mail id to a public service, you can create a self-destructing e-mail address of the form: your-service-name.n.your_ log-in-name@spamgourmet.com. Here `n' is the number of e-mails you want to receive in this address before you want this e-mail id to die. That is, if the name of the service you want to sign-up with is `lug', your spamgourment `user name' is `jmspam' and you want to receive 5 mails in this address, the disposable address can take the form: lug.5.jmspam@spamgourmet.com.
Mails addressed to this id will automatically get forwarded to your real mail address and once the number of mails exceeds five, `Spamgourment' will stop forwarding the mails addressed to the disposable address. Jetable.org ( http://www.jetable.org/en/index ) is another disposable e-mail address service worth a trial. For your real e-mail id, the service will provide you with a disposable e-mail alias that can last for one to eight days. During the Jetable e-mail alias' lifetime, any mail addressed to it will be forwarded to your real e-mail id.
To create a disposable address, enter your real e-mail id, select the new address' life span and click on the `create' button. TrashMail ( http://trashmail.net/ ) is a `one use' disposable mail redirection address service. Here, only the first email sent to the disposable address will be forwarded to your real address. After the `first use' the address gets deleted. 
